Keywords

Erna Brodber’s intervention in Caribbean literary and philosophical discourse, and specifically in the discourse of black ontology evinces a dual concern with engaging conventional history and transcending it via mythology and with evoking a gender inflection that expands these discussions considerably. Given that the emergence of an Afro-Caribbean subjectivity was impeded by damaging versions of colonial history foisted upon the region, and that female subjectivity was doubly marginalized within this matrix, Brodber’s emphasis on gender seeks to denaturalize the androcentric assumption of the male as the principal (and only) subject of history. Like many other Caribbean women writers, she challenges the subordinated status of women in historical representation and in Caribbean philosophical thought and seeks to bring equitable balance to these discussions by foregrounding women, as seen in such works as Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Louisiana (1994), and Myal (1988). If, in the nationalist era of the 1960s, Caribbean thinkers’ engagement with history “set the agenda of intellectual discourse,” “influenced the […] themes of creative expression” (James 1959) and added momentum to political and social transformation of the region, Brodber’s investment in stories that foreground women in history contributes to post-nationalist discussions of freedom and to the reconceptualization of the category “human” in its broadest meaning. Foundational to Brodber’s poetics is her investment in history and African cosmogonies, both of which establish the provenance of African worldviews in reshaping discourse on being and existentiality in the contemporary Caribbean and in the globalized world. Her oeuvre presents a broadened conceptualization, or a radical remapping of the contours of the Caribbean self and engenders a narrative scope that challenges masculinist constructs of Caribbean selfhood.

In her latest novel, Nothing’s Mat, (2014), Brodber’s theorization of black ontology takes in a wide swath of Afrodiasporic space, exploring a widening circle of personal, psychic, and philosophical journeying. In this novel she utilizes a fractal paradigm, based on African cosmogony and aesthetics, to probe the ways in which those explorations of ontology operate across space and time. Examining Afro-Caribbean existence within a larger framing of the African diaspora, through the construct of African fractal geometry, and focalizing “woman” narratives of history within a liberatory schematic, Nothing’s Mat extends the continuing emancipatory project in literary representation. The frame of fractal tropology offers possibilities for understanding African and African diaspora cultural phenomena and identity, and, specifically, what it means to be woman, to be black, to be human. The novel returns us to Africa, as its fractal epistemology is more African than diasporic. Yet, while it is peopled with Black characters who reside variously in Britain, Jamaica, Panama, and the United States, their interconnected lives and heritage bring into focus the genealogy of the term “African diaspora.”

Pan-Africanism stressed the commonalities among Africans globally and articulated political imperatives in the interest of global Black liberation. In the mid-1950s, the concept of “diaspora” became prevalent and, according to Brent Hayes Edwards (2003), signaled an important intervention in Pan-Africanist discourse that simultaneously acknowledged constitutive differences in “formations of black internationalism,” and provided a “conceptual metaphor” for the analysis of these formations, while implicitly signaling a “linking or connecting across gaps” (11). Defining the African diaspora, Michael Gomez (2005)1 focalizes “comparisons and relationships between communities of African descended people geographically separated or culturally distinct” (2). He identifies common elements such as an affinity with Africa as a place of origin, enslavement of ancestors, adaptation to a new environment, continued struggle against discrimination, the significance of Africa in the lives of African-descended peoples, and the reification of color and race (2). The concept of African diaspora functions, then, as an important and useful frame for mapping the black experience across historical, geographical, and cultural spaces and times and thus, for examining Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat within a historical and cultural frame as well as within a literary tradition and genealogy characterized by diasporic intersections. The critical questions as to how we can extrapolate these historical, social, and cultural divergences and simultaneously recognize similarities of the Black experience within the different spaces and times are explored in Nothing’s Mat. The African diaspora creates a space beyond the boundaries of nation and makes possible meaningful cross-cultural exploration of the existential realities of African-descended peoples residing in different locations and temporalities, as the characters in the novel reside in Britain, Jamaica, Panama, and the United States.

The divergences and synergies in the narratives show the interconnectedness, the intricately woven histories of family members whose presence is symbolically plaited into the structure of a mat, which itself stands as a metaphor for the potential unity of the African diaspora. I want to suggest Brodber’s use of a mat, rather than the usual anthropological diagrammatic structure of a family tree, as an innovative and important trope that represents a radical remapping of the concept of ‘family’, and an epistemological shift in presenting a family history and the metaphorical genealogy for the diaspora. The mat and the process of weaving have important cultural and communal associations with African indigenous labor and cultural preservation, and as such, are intricately connected to a material history of continental Africans, and the associated historical narratives of Africans in the diaspora. Brodber’s especial focus on African mat weaving highlights these functions within Africa and its diaspora. As well, she presents the woven mat as a counter-historical narrative to the written colonial records. In virtually all of Brodber’s creative and intellectual work, history is a focal element.2 Her philosophy of history functions centrally in the formation of an Afro-Caribbean/African diasporic consciousness. In The Continent of Black Consciousness, for example, Brodber (2003) elaborates on the crucial role of historical knowledge in a people’s advancement toward self-consciousness, self-affirmation, and collective progress (xi). In Nothing’s Mat, she similarly gives centrality to “rediscovery” and reweaving of Black history within the milieu of contemporary Jamaica, and to reaching back to ancestral foundations that underpin her fictional ontology.

Brodber transforms the genre of the historical novel by engaging particular fictional strategies that facilitate in-depth probing of Afro-Caribbean selfhood and prompt us to reformulate our understanding of historical time and the constituents of subjectivity. A significant element in this fictional ontology is that Brodber revises linear time, offering an alternative temporality marked by an expansion of “the living present.” This process mediates time and perception, ultimately reconciling and bringing cohesion to the seemingly asymmetrical backwards and forwards movement within a plasticity of consciousness. Moreover, a significant element in Brodber’s fractal poetics is that it provides a frame for overturning traditional concepts of linearity in the treatment of history. Fractal structure undoes the rectilinear concept of time, and thus broadens the scope of imaginative thought. This has implications for the novel’s conceptions of historical time and of blood relations and diasporic unity.

Writers of the African diaspora frequently display thematic commonalities, often addressing forced migration, dislocation, racial slavery, and colonial domination, or the more contemporaneous experience of displacement, exile, and un-belonging. Indeed, Brodber examined some of these thematic elements in Louisiana (1994), exploring the meaning and reaches of diasporic spaces—material or metaphysical—to enact a transcendence of oppressive systems within postcolonial milieu. In Nothing’s Mat, she extends these themes to articulate the power of resilience within Afro-diasporic communities and the diverse ways in which these communities reclaim a sense of belonging, located-ness, and historical significance. Moreover, the various narratives of the novel represent interconnected points within a fractal design/paradigm. The novel incorporates the post-slavery era, and moves through to the contemporary moment, charting the struggles of the formerly enslaved to achieve physical and psychic reconstitution. The narrative shifts from one locale to another: from the Black immigrant experience in Britain, represented by Herbert and Bridget, and their children Evan and Princess, all cousins to Nothing, to the rural experiences of Cousin Nothing in Jamaica, to the pioneering enterprise of Euphemia in Panama, to the black power enlistment of Joy (Nothing’s cousin, once removed) in the United States. Yet, the historical, social, cultural, and geographical divergence of these experiences is superseded by the similarity of the existential concerns that these narratives reveal. I posit Brodber’s employment of fractal structure as philosophical positioning and as textual architectonics. Fractals signify on several levels: those of her cultural, historiographical and imaginative work. Historiography, anthropology, and social science coalesce within Brodber’s project yielding a broad set of principles that collapse disciplinary boundaries and provide alternative ways of reading literary and cultural experiences.

African Fractals and African Knowledge Systems

Fractal geometry is ubiquitous within African cultural practices and knowledge systems; it is seen in African divination systems, social organizations, textile design, and architectural design. The five essential components of fractal geometry are, according to Ron Eglash (1999), recursion, scaling, self-similarity, infinity, and fractional dimension. In his study of African fractals, Eglash traces the prevalence of these architectural designs in the spiritual, artistic, and everyday life and work across African communities and in the African diaspora, and asserts that, “traditional African settlements typically show this ‘self-similar’ characteristic: circles of circles of circular dwellings, rectangular walls enclosing ever-smaller rectangles and streets in which broad avenues branch down to tiny footpaths with striking geometric repetition” (4). Eglash’s research shows fractal geometry as fundamental to African knowledge systems (3). These knowledge systems and wisdom traditions upon which Brodber draws render usable constructs for examining the realities of, and creative responses to, the cultural and socio-political milieus that form the setting of her novel.

The several narrative threads of this complex novel are contained across geographical space through the construct of the Caribbean family, which serves as a metonym for diaspora. The sisal mat at the center of the novel, which traces and articulates shared familial history, serves not only as the fabric of the Caribbean lineage that the protagonist, Princess, attempts to investigate, but also as the structural framework of the novel itself, which shifts recursively through time and space. The fractal configuration both of the mat and the novel reinforces the revolving structure of connectedness and diaspora, where an understanding of the past provides necessary context for reconciliation, relationships, self-affirmation, and growth within the contemporary space. In the novel, Cousin Nothing, or Conut as she is sometimes called, introduces the mat as the best means to respond to Princess’s request to trace her personal history as part of her senior project on the Caribbean family. Princess, born in England of Jamaican parents, selects this project and travels to Jamaica to meet her cousin, whose name she finds mysterious and intriguing. Her investigations into her past provide contexts for self-knowledge that sustain her throughout her life; Princess continually returns to Jamaica throughout her intellectual studies, eventually settling in Jamaica and completing the mat and experiencing a deep connection with “ancestral spirits and energy” (Brodber 2014, 106). Her journeys between England and Jamaica recall the journeys of previous generations in her family, reflecting the recursive elements of the mat structure.

The making of the mat begins with strands of sisal harvested from a ping wing macca plant that Cousin Nothing identifies as one with a growth progression that “follows the natural path” (13). Referring to the structure of the leaves, she observes, “one leaf would emerge, then another, then two—the sum of one and one—then three—the sum of two and one, then five would emerge—the sum of two and three … the number of leaves continuing to determine the next number of leaves to infinity” (13). Connecting this to a “law of creativity laid down by the Supreme Being,” Cousin Nothing asserts that “there was a natural process to growth, and it was that we should always double back to base before going forward” (13). This process becomes the means by which Princess not only creates the sisal mat but also theorizes the Caribbean family and establishes her journey to personal development. The mat is symbolically invoked early in the novel when Princess describes herself as existing “in a sea of nothingness” (4). As Princess nervously explores her feelings of nothingness, and the fact that her “parts are not talking to each other,” she is relieved to note that her “frontal lobe is still intact,” signaling that she is “still human” (3). This grounded-ness is fed by her revitalizing memories, which reassure her of her own humanity. In her state of loneliness, Princess broods about her sense of disconnection. “Nothing is happening,” she laments. “Nothing. Not attached” (4). Her desire for rootedness, for connection, takes her back to Cousin Nothing and as she recalls her singing, “I have an anchor,” she wonders about her own need of an anchor in that moment (5). References to strings, webs, anchors, and roots, as well as to memory and humanity, invoke connectivity. The structures themselves are fractal, representing a crisscrossing constellation of metaphors that move out to form a meta-constellation. Conceptually, they function as the medium through which one connects to combat the loneliness of exile and the un-belonging that often portrays the diasporic experience.

On Family History and Diaspora History

The novel shifts abruptly to Princess’s young adulthood, when she is at the initial stage of selecting a topic for her senior project. Her mother suggests that a study of her father’s “alternative” Caribbean family would necessitate a reformulation or revision of received European notions of family. Turning to Princess’s father, she asks, “Where are you going to put Conut, your mother’s sister who isn’t your mother’s sister?” (5). This question, proposed in jest, lies at the heart of Nothing’s Mat, a novel in which family, and by extension the African diaspora, must be conceived in ways that challenge linear structures, whether of generations or of blood. In order to map her family using linear formulations, Princess’s mother interjects, “they would have to be born again and in some order” (5). In fact, upon meeting Conut and arranging to stay with her to complete her family tree, Princess is faced with just such a challenge:

“So you want to know your family line,” Conut states.

“Yes,” I said and went for my diagram.

She glanced at it, put it on the table, and said “Come.”

Thus begins Princess’s memory project that traverses the length of the novel and the greater part of her life as, together with Conut (Cousin Nothing), she weaves a mat encompassing the life stories of her forebears, not in a linear tree, but in a fractal formation, weaving backward and forward to integrate the past, the present, and the future, and the interstitial spaces that transcend fixed temporality. As Princess weaves the sisal mat and learns the stories of those that have come before her, she gains a greater sense of her own purpose, value, and significance, both within her family and within the community she is invited to join. Princess’s growth, evinced in her expanding knowledge base and her pursuit of familial and romantic relationships, involves repeated returns to Jamaica from England. Her journeys back to Conut to complete the sisal mat enrich her knowledge of family and of self. The mat is intricately linked to identity reconstruction, and reflects a complex system in which circularity, replication, and self-similarity weave the narrative of Afrodiasporic cultural histories, the process of claiming and asserting Afrodiasporic cultural and personal histories, and the resilience to the atrocities that those histories contain.

Brodber’s use of the West Indian family, in all its diversity, resonates with the discourses of diaspora and fractality, as generations of family members represent both variance and similarity, simultaneously. When Princess arrives in Cousin Nothing’s village, she hears the villagers saying, “What a way she look like Conut. Same fine body” (6). Opting to stay in the village, she is pleasantly surprised to find a full wardrobe of Conut’s clothes that fit her (6). This theme of the past continually returning in the present is prevalent throughout the text and undergirds the fractal concept of looping, with circular patterns extending out, then turning backward. This recursive nature of fractals reveals that, “no matter the number of fractalizations, the parts are interconnected into a whole which is self-similar to the parts” (Voicu 2014, 226). As a partial replication of Conut, Princess herself provides one of many examples of this self-similarity in the generations presented in Nothing’s Mat. Conut, whose birth comes as a surprise to her mother and grandmother, as well as to her two possible fathers, is acknowledged by Mass Eustace as his child when “he look[s] in the baby’s face [and sees] his mother” (Brodber 2014, 20). This opinion is shared by his twin sister, Euphemia, who finds “her mother’s nose upon the child” (20). Mass Eustace and Euphemia both grow attached to Conut, and he finds himself looking forward to playing with “his miniature mother” (21). Even as Mass Eustace sees his mother in Conut, her mother, Clarise, sees her own paternal grandmother, “one of those who come from somewhere else” whom she encountered only once. Before Clarise’s untimely death from tuberculosis, she shared with her daughter her one memory of this African woman who performs her spinning dance: “I see her spinning around, spinning around like dry leaf can spin by themselves when they catch up in spider’s web and breeze is blowing. Just spinning with her hands spread out like wings to balance her so that she can’t drop to the ground” (58–59). For Clarise, Conut is a loop back to this African grandmother, another symbolic anchor, whom she never got to know, but whose memory sustains her. Clarise laments that, ‘I never see my grandmother again and nobody tell me anything, so I say to myself that she spin and spin and her feet lift up off the ground and she fly to the heaven in the sky” (59), and bestows this narrative to Conut, who continues the dance (59). “She look so much like my grandmother,” Clarise muses; “funny, for when Mass Eustace see her he always saying how she have his mother face” (59).

This recursive generational pattern of births continues with the birth of Princess’s daughter, Clarise the second, who is pet-named Polly, after Princess’s aunt. Polly (the second) also performs Conut’s spinning dance. Observing her, Princess marvels, “I had once been privileged to see Nothing in a pose which I felt was impossible, a skill that Nothing didn’t want spoken about. I have never mentioned it to anyone, yet here was this child contorted like the bird into which I had seen Nothing turn herself, the bird into which Clarise’s grandmother, the African, had perhaps turned herself to fly away home to wherever, and about which Clarise had told Nothing when she was just a baby” (102). This recursive nesting reinforces the relationships between the generations, linking the diasporic present to the ancestral past, superimposing upon linear constructions of generational time a fractal structure that allows, in a sense, for “infinity within a finite boundary” (Welch 2010, 99). Princess abandons the acyclic graph model for creating the “Family tree” in favor of the configuration of the sisal mat, with its concentric circular patterns to represent her family’s history, honoring the maxim, “your end is your beginning” (Brodber 2014, 14). She and Conut comb the strings of the ping wing macca tree, and “twist the strings into strong cord” as Conut shares her knowledge of the family. At the start of the senior research project, Princess “tried to put the data into the grid [she] had brought” (14). She later chooses instead to “focus on the never-ending circles that [they] were making that seemed like a mat of family” (14). As evinced in the naming practices and resemblances of family members across generations in Nothing’s Mat, this “self-similarity” in which patterns of the whole repeat within each of its parts represents microcosm and macrocosm. This relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm resonates not only with the example of Princess’s particular family, but also with the Caribbean family, and with the African Diaspora.

Princess’s work on Conut’s mat results in the successful completion of her senior project, which is very well received, and launches her career as a researcher. More importantly, her research garners commendation and her professor’s observation that “the literature speaks of the Caribbean family as ‘fractured’ [but] you might be able to prove that it is fractal” (36). This intellectual pursuit becomes Princess’s life’s work as she continues working with Conut to expand the sisal mat and to complete her journey toward self-history and self-knowledge. Her relationship with her cousin named “Nothing,” and the history Nothing bequeaths, enriches her life in ways she could not have predicted at seventeen, when she embarked on her first journey to Jamaica.

On ‘Smadditization’

While Brodber’s character “Nothing” represents history’s repository, such a representation is paradoxical to the idea of “Nothing-ness” in Caribbean historiography and with various regional critics’ “quarrel with history.”3 In his 1962 text, The Middle Passage, V.S. Naipaul, commenting on the lack of history in the West Indies, asserts, “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. … History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (2001, 20). This statement ignited the ire of many Caribbean intellectuals, poets, cultural theorists, social theorists alike, who variously responded to counteract this notion of nothingness that had become a specter in West Indian historical consciousness.

Nothing becomes the channel to recovery, in spite of her own inauspicious beginnings. Clarise, her mother, had been naïvely unaware of her own pregnancy, and it was not until the premature emergence of the baby at seven months that she attained full knowledge of her preceding condition. This newborn would have been thrown into the latrine were it not for the scream that drew the attention of Miss Maud, Clarise’s “mother.” The narrator tells us, “Miss Maud asked her what is wrong. Clarise said, “Nothing, mam.” Miss Maud retrieves the child and indignantly asks, “So dis ya something wid two legs, ten toes and ten fingers, and a head is ‘nothing’? Ah dat you baby name, Gal?” Miss Maud responds to neighbors’ queries as to whether something is wrong with, “Nothing wrong.” Although the child is named June, she is thereafter dubbed “Nothing.”

For Brodber, the narratives of personal, national, regional, and global history are paramount to the completion of the project of emancipation for Caribbean peoples. Nothing’s Mat offers redress to the rhetoric of history-less-ness and to the histories of dispossession, and foregrounds women in this regard. The presence of the title character, in spite of her name, negates the purported history-less-ness, since she is in fact history’s repository. Nothing weaves the family history into the structure of the sisal mat, with the circular patterns, recursive maneuvers and reversions, which symbolize the history of the individual family, the West Indian family, and the wider African diaspora family, as it reclaims an ontological mooring for the reconstruction of the self. The title character and her history are made material and productive, providing the framework for connecting to the past and to the diaspora. They also reformulate the epistemologies that inform our understanding of history’s form, function, and purpose. Princess’s collection of Conut’s history challenges and reconfigures the conceptions of the West Indian family in “the literature,” that is, in traditional academic constructions; her continued research represents the reconfiguring of history that is now insisted upon by those, like Princess, (and, indeed, Brodber herself) who are inspired to collect and value the historical experiences and oral accounts rendered by latent repositories of history within the African diaspora. “My presentation did not use the straight lines and arrows that one normally sees in family trees,” Princess remarks, “I used the circles as in Conut’s mat” (36). She recalls her parents being worried about her teacher’s response to the non-traditional structure of her research results. Her teacher’s response, citing Conut’s phrase, “in what odd places does wisdom reside” (36), speaks to the changing ideologies of historicism in the academy, and to the rejection of monumentalism as the only legitimate index of historical contributions.

This impulse to reclaim the elided Caribbean ontology is evident in the theorizations of many Caribbean writers and scholars; some commentators have asserted the need to reclaim a self, submerged within the wreck of colonial history. Rex Nettleford (2003) is credited with the neologism, “smadditization,” derived from the Jamaican vernacular word, “smaddy,” which in translation, means “somebody.” Hence, smadditization refers to the process of becoming or being acknowledged as somebody. This implies that personhood had previously been denied or unrecognized. Using Nettleford’s neologism, Charles Mills (2013) explains smadditization as “the struggle for the insistence on personhood … a kind of ontological self-engineering” (328). Mills’s usage of the term entails “the valorization of oneself as an agent of moral and cognitive evaluation” (334). He submits that Caribbean achievement lies in “the re-creation of a self in an ontological construction more daring than any essayed in the world of European philosophy. The survival of the person and the reinvention of the self in the Caribbean experience in general and in the Black experience in particular, is one of the most remarkable feats of human history” (338).

This process, then, of coming into being, is a concern for Brodber as she renders the historical narrative of a person who, though known as “Nothing”, is the guardian of history. Princess’s research, and Brodber’s work in Nothing’s Mat, involve mapping and recording those remarkable achievements that are not to be found in the structures and monuments constituting European-derived epistemologies, but in the everyday lives, the struggles and resistances, as well as the folk ways and the self-sustaining practices of peoples of the diaspora, particularly those of women. Princess’s growth as a scholar and ethnographer shifts the narrative of history and historiography. Extending her research to attain a terminal degree, she turns her energies to augmenting Conut’s mat by including “the details that Cousin Nothing did not know about, [sticking] them around the circumference of the mat [to] give it closure” (40). In the text, Princess becomes “Dr. Something” (Brodber 2014, 40), achieving the status of Smaddy.

On Redefining Family/Destabilizing Filiation

While Princess’s growth is strongly symbolized in her intellectual journey, it is also portrayed in her relationships with her extended family and with the family she eventually raises herself. Just as the fractal formation of the sisal mat destabilizes linear constructions of historical time, it also demands a rejection of linear constructions of blood relations. Referring to her grandmother’s siblings, who are seemingly not her siblings, Princess dismisses these distinctions in a meaningful aside, “[D]oes kinship terminology matter?” This begs the question as to why humans draw lines of demarcation between blood relations, and everyone else (23). These lines appear increasingly arbitrary in the example of Princess’s family, just as they do in theories of diaspora. Indeed, the terms and expressions of kinship are stretched, doubled, and extended in the novel, rendering it difficult to distinguish who is related to whom, and through what means. Fosterings, adoptions, and connections of love frequently supersede traditional blood relationships.

Brodber provides us with earlier narratives of fosterings, adoptions, and connections of love in her rendering of the story of Maud, the matriarch of the story. Maud serves as the point of recursion in Princess’s family history. It is significant that Brodber places a woman at the center not only of the history of Princess’s family but also at the center of symbolic diasporic history. Maud’s place in history is reified not only in the mat, but in her actions as mother and as a revolutionary figure, initiating the infamous burning of the courthouse in the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, a signal moment in Jamaican history. Situating Maud as a pivotal contributor to the rebellion, Brodber reconfigures Jamaican history not only to include the contributions of women, but also to subvert masculinist constructions of black revolutionary politics and activism. She dislodges the conception of the absent female in showing Maud’s militarism. The invisibility to which women had historically been consigned in discourse is vigorously questioned and corrected in Nothing’s Mat. Michelle Rowley’s observations regarding new historiographical approaches among Caribbean women are germane here:

By questioning the absence of women from historical texts, Caribbean feminist historiographers opened a pathway to discuss the implications of archival silences and fissures. … These historically produced … rhetorical practices raise peculiar ontological questions for black women in that while we lay claims to the capacity to produce knowledge, we must first … have figured out how to argue … our way into being. (Rowley 2010, 10)

At sixteen, Maud flees Morant Bay with Clarise, the sister of her slain betrothed, and raises “Gal” as her own child, though she is merely nine years Clarise’s senior (Brodber 2014, 48). Recovering from being gang raped by seven Maroons who sought revenge for her role in the Morant Bay rebellion, Maud travels on foot from Stony Gut to Kingston, and in that time, cares for the “Gal” she barely knows. Maternal impulses, what Maud refers to as feeling “mother things,” develop in spite of her own personal agonies as the two travelers attempt to escape to safety from the turmoil of their home. She comes to understand that “her little sister would have to be her child, and [with that, simply put,] she was.” Maud admits that, “De child vex but me can’t take that on for as mi tell her mi is now her mother and she have to listen to what me say and obey. Then mi realize that me now have to behave certain way so that she can respect what me say and obey me” (49). Clarise is grudgingly thankful for the security provided by “this lady, who call herself my sister and sometimes my mother” (55); “I didn’t really know her well, this woman who sey she is in charge of me, and I don’t know if she knew me” (53). While recalling her brother Modibe’s intentions to marry Maud and therefore make Maud and Clarise sisters, Clarise ponders, “How can someone be “going to be” your sister. Your sister is born your sister;” however, she accepts Maud as her sister-mother, stating, “This female who say she was in charge of me must be my sister” (53). This acceptance is based not on her biologically determined assumption but on the lived experience of nurture, protection, and love she receives. “Sometimes,” she recalls, “when we were in the cave on the beach, she would put her hand around my shoulder. That feel good and I feel like I have a mother. Also, I know that she wasn’t sleeping most of the time we were in the sea cave, but instead watching over me” (53–54).

This destabilization of bloodlines begins at the outset of the narrative as Princess reflects on the function of titles and manners in Jamaican culture, and particularly on references that shift traditional significations of familial positioning. Terms such as “Uncle Brother,” Princess suggests, may refer to an “adult male who might have been called ‘Brother’ as a pet name by his younger sibs” only to have a handle put to his name out of respect later in life, hence “Uncle Brother” (1). Names and titles, familial relations and linear bloodlines are undercut, most particularly by the introduction of Princess’s cousin, Conut, or Cousin Nothing, who appears to be Princess’s paternal grandmother’s “sister who isn’t’ [her] sister” (5). Adoption, as well as traditional and nontraditional fosterings, recurs throughout the novel and amongst Princess’s diasporic family. She learns that her own mother “had been left on a bridge” in the middle of the road to be crushed by traffic, but was, luckily, taken to safety, and adopted. In Jamaica, Princess encounters Keith, a young man likely poisoned by Mass Eustace in his efforts to ward off potential thieves trying to steal his dasheens and other crops. Most likely out of guilt, Eustace fosters the child, who was born malformed, and offers his mother “a square of land to work” and helps her to “build a little house in the bush” to raise her son (12). Conut assumes the care of Keith after Eustace dies, taking on the role of mother to the “dasheen boy” whom she reveals to Princess. Another example of adoption occurs when Mass Eustace’s sister, Euphemia, an enterprising woman, travels to Panama to trade in yams and develops her own laundry business there, eventually inviting and adopting Pearl, one of her nieces, who is in fact Princess’s grandmother.

After her failed first marriage to an American man with whom she has two children, Pearl returns to Jamaica and marries Neville, the other possible father to Conut (who, saved earlier from the responsibilities of fatherhood, has achieved higher education, as the pastor had earlier predicted). Neville helps raise Pearl’s first two children, John and Sally, along with their subsequent two, Polly and Herbert, the latter being Princess’s father. The four children grow up as siblings, not half-siblings. The two older ones are sent to America for schooling and are made American citizens by their father, who assumes responsibility for their later upbringing. They remain close as adults and Sally eventually names her own son John the second. Sally’s son, John and her brother John’s daughter, Joy grow up as siblings. It is the unfair arrest of Joy’s “brother-cousin” John that spurs her black activism and makes her the “revolutionary sister-cousin” of the family (78). Clearly, navigating the relationships in Nothing’s Mat requires a fractal frame of mind! At the heart of these intertwining relationships is recursivity. As Princess acknowledges, “she and [Joy] were just a repeat of Nothing and Pearl” (95). These reiterations of the previous generations strongly suggest that family relationships can be fostered regardless of blood, time, or geographic space. This idea is inherent in the underlying thesis of Princess’s work, that the Caribbean family, and, by extension, the African diaspora, is fractal rather than fractured, and that history, memory, and connectivity can bridge distances of blood, time and region to engender a deep sense of belonging. Princess is optimistic about her own children’s potential for growth, given the wealth of knowledge she has shared with them about their ancestors and their history through the sisal mat. She predicts that they will make their own mat when the time is right and asserts that “the experience will certainly connect them to another set of kin and another set of happy energy. They won’t know the nothingness that set me to completing Nothing’s mat, because they understand more about ancestral spirits and energy than I knew at thirty” (106). Brodber’s novel posits history and self-knowledge as the bridge to happiness and spiritual connection. As a metaphor for the African diaspora, the mat reveals the ways in which the survivors of the Middle Passage constitute a family, separated by time, space and blood, but still evincing strong potential for unity.

On Liberation

Brodber’s creative work operates within the sphere of asserting female presence, and provides productive framing concepts through which freedom can be imagined. For example, her imaginative account of the Morant Bay rebellion shows not only women’s resilience in the face of abuse and violation, and their ability to ensure their own survival, but demonstrates also their participation in the fight for social justice. Brodber situates women firmly within the discourse of resistance. Her fiction, with its focus on female representation, furthers this discussion of self-definition, compels a wider discussion of gender, and invites an examination of the novelist’s modes of intervening in the discourse of Caribbean feminism. While she sees her work as part of the Afro-Caribbean women’s tradition that seeks to illuminate the multifarious expressions of women’s existence, Brodber refuses the category of Afro-Caribbean feminist writer, specifically. If feminism is a modality that seeks to privilege the liberation of women over other dominated subjects, it is not a position with which she is aligned. Rather, her emphasis is on the liberation of all oppressed groups and classes of persons in society, which, in her view, is a moral and political imperative and, as such, a necessary condition for the emancipation of women.

While Brodber eschews the label “feminist,” her acute awareness of the liberatory imperative in her own ideological stance and in her work enables us to see how and why she foregrounds the struggle of women, and of Black women in particular, as part of the wider struggle of people for justice and equality. She sees race as the most contested of categories in the discourse of Caribbean freedom and in the global project of human liberation. In Nothing’s Mat, placing the Black female as protagonist serves to foreground her narrative, which had been underserved within the intellectual and literary traditions largely informed by the masculine inflections of male forerunners who were the founding architects of early literary traditions. Nothing’s Mat extends this work, as Cousin Nothing, arguably, can be read as symbolic of not only Caribbean history, but women’s history, redeemed from nothingness. Brodber’s gender politics is thus mediated through her overarching consciousness of race and concomitantly, of freedom, which in her view, takes precedence in the project of human liberation, even as she situates the Afro-Caribbean woman within the poetics of self-determination. As Rowley points out, colonialism, the Middle Passage, and the Kala Pani, as events within the long arc of history “hold specific ontological urgency for women in and of the African diaspora” (Rowley 2010, 3) since within these occurrences, women have arguably been the most systematically excluded and denigrated.

Nothing’s Mat brings into sharp focus this project of recuperation, restoring the place of the Black woman and, by extension, all of humanity. Principal characters in Brodber’s novels, mainly women, engage in existential quests and politics of the self in ways that are similar to characters of Caribbean liberatory novels that precede her, mostly written by men. Beyond a shift in sex, Brodber’s narratives introduce gendered dynamics that bring greater scope to the Caribbean quest for selfhood and self-affirmation and, through incorporating female narrative voice, agency, and autonomy, enable the constructions and emergence of the feminine subject. Brodber’s literary discourse on history and on identity, apprehended through the frame of fractal geometry and through a lens that illuminates the female role within these matrices, adds to several bodies of scholarship simultaneously: Caribbean women’s literary tradition, Afrodiasporic studies, and Africana philosophy. Analyzing the fractal construct at work in Nothing’s Mat reveals it as an inventive strategy for reading familial interconnectedness and resemblances, and for reinforcing a consciousness of diasporic relationalities. Brodber’s innovative use of fractals to present Afro-Caribbean and diasporic history reveals how the intricacies of these histories evince self-similarity across space and time. Brodber presents interwoven narratives across geographical space through the construct of family, which serves as a metonym for diaspora. In this fictional ontology she revises linear time, offering an alternative temporality that is marked by an “expansion of the living present,” and which mediates time and space, ultimately reconciling and bringing cohesion to the seemingly asymmetrical backward and forward movement within a plasticity of consciousness. The fractal construct, then, bears the potential for extending “family resemblances” outward, anchoring us within a metaphysics of relationality in ways that transcend spatial and temporal fixedness, and offers an equitable epistemological frame for envisioning a collective humanity.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Gomez outlines these characteristics of African diasporic identity in his book, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge University Press), 2005.

  2. 2.

    Brodber’s nonfiction (historical) texts include The People of My Jamaican Village 1817–1948 (1999); The Continent of Back Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day (2003); Woodside: Pear Tree Grove P.O. (2004); The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907–1944 (2004); and Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation: African American and African Jamaican Connections, 1782–1996 (2019).

  3. 3.

    Edward Baugh. “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History.” Small Axe, vol. 16, no. 2 (no. 38), 2012, pp. 60–74. This article was previously published in Tapia, 1977.

    Other writers of the region including Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Derek Walcott have similarly engaged the discourse of history in the Caribbean.